SEOUL, South Korea — The U.S military says two nuclear-capable B-2 bombers have completed a training mission in South Korea amid threats from North Korea that include nuclear strikes on Washington and Seoul.

The statement Thursday by U.S. Forces Korea is an unusual confirmation. It follows an earlier U.S. announcement that nuclear-capable B-52 bombers participated in ongoing U.S.-South Korean military drills.

The U.S. says the B-2 stealth bombers flew from a U.S. air base and dropped munitions on a South Korean island range before returning home.

The announcement will likely draw a strong response from Pyongyang. North Korea sees the military drills as part of a U.S. plot to invade and becomes particularly upset about U.S. nuclear activities in the region.

Washington and Seoul say they the annual drills are routine and defensive.

"Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the addition of nuclear-capable B-2 stealth bombers to military drills with South Korea was part of normal exercises and not intended to provoke a reaction from the north." (CBS News, 3/28/2013)

To fly two B-2 stealth bombers to and from South Korea, it costs $5.5 million, according to Antiwar.com.

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The new cold war is in the Far East: China, about to become the number one power in raw economic terms, desires free access to the Pacific (via Taiwan, Diaoyou/Senkaku) and a safe route to West Asia and Africa (hence the "chain of pearls" of small naval bases in the Indian Ocean and the pressure on the South China Sea atolls).

Meanwhile the USA has aggressively consolidated its military domination of the World:

1. The Iraq Wars allowed them to gain important bases (Bahrain, etc.), securing West Asia (except Iran, Syria) for the Empire.

2. The Afghan War allowed them to gain bases in Central Asia, an advance position against Russia and China.

3. The recent intervention in Mali, whose Islamist "revolt" was clearly engineered by US allies: Morocco and Qatar, has allowed the USA to finally set direct military basis in Africa (Niger, Burkina Faso) with the pretext of fighting Islamism.

4. India is more and more in the orbit of the US empire. For this I blame China's lack of vision, because a China-India alliance would be pretty much unstoppable and there's actually little point on feeding the bilateral quarrels. On the other side the BRICS bloc is an asset to China but it's not really a solid alliance, just an agglomerate of independent developing regional powers.

China will almost without doubt overcome the USA, as sovereign state, in GDP in few years but in terms or real economic power measured in terms of Empire, the US-led bloc will still be three times or more the size of China... unless it becomes fragmented, something the USA are fighting against with all their forces: military, secret services, diplomacy...

French ACRO found more tritium in Channel than near Fukushima ocean (13Bq/l) : 110 Bq/l of tritium near La Hague AREVA plant on 17th october 2012.No information from AREVA, neither mainstream media.French ASN says it is not dangerous.Sorry, no link in english.

The B-2 was a huge waste of money it requires very special climate controlled storage facilities Whiteman AFB in Missouri is the only permanent B-2 facility on the planet. This plane cost $135,000 dollars per flight hour (2x the cost of other bombers) and all of its targets are on the other side of the world. With strike missions taking 12 to 22 hours to deliver their payload an ICBM is a much, much faster and cheaper way to deliver a nuclear payload. Also there are only 21 of the aircraft and they aren't fully invisible to radar as a matter of fact it failed a radar evasion test early in the program.

>The action by Senator Jim Exon of Nebraska was the most significant erosion of support for the plane since the Air Force told Congressional leaders this week that the B-2 had failed a test of its ability to evade enemy radar.

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